Whatsapp bans over 16 lakh Indian accounts owing to abusive behavior of users

According to Meta owned Whatsapp's monthly disclosure report,  the messaging application had over 16.7 lakh  accounts banned in India in the month of April.   122 accounts were restrained as a result of obligatory steps based on user complaints, while the majority of them, approximately 16.66 lakh accounts, were restricted to prevent detrimental behavior on the platform.

The app bans an account when it is assertive of abusive user behavior, as per the Whatsapp framework.  "Because our goal is to discover and terminate abusive accounts as rapidly as possible, manually identifying these accounts is not feasible. Instead, we have advanced machine learning technologies that respond 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to block accounts," the whatsapp report said.

The business stated that it prohibits accounts in various situations, including when the account receives unfavorable feedback, such as when other users report or block the account. According to the report, after unfavorable feedback is submitted, the app's systems examine the account and take appropriate action.

In March, Whatsapp banned over 18 lakh accounts, compared to 14.26 lakh in February. In January, a total of 18.58 lakh accounts were suspended in India.  Whatsapp had already blocked 20.79 lakh Indian  accounts in December and nearly 17.5 lakh in November last year.

The report said: "We are particularly focused on prevention because we believe it is much better to stop harmful activity from taking place first hand than to detect it after the damage has been done."

Massive digital platforms, (with more than 50 lakh users) are required to submit compliance reports every month, detailing every element of the complaints received and actions taken, under new IT guidelines that went into force last year. Whatsapp had earlier stated that it had no see into the content of any chats, because it is an end-to-end encrypted network.